Tag: CUNY

I received my copy of the June 2018 American Quarterly last week and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see my essay, “Time Traveling with Care: On Female Coolies and Archival Speculations,” in print at last in a journal that I’ve been following since I began my graduate studies. That it appears alongside the words of Kandice Chuh, Jodi Melamed, Douglas Ishii, and other scholars who have been vital mentors and interlocutors for my research over the years is all the more reason why I will hold this AQ issue close.

The essay itself has gone through numerous revisions, from its early beginnings as a term paper for Robert Reid-Pharr’s seminar on “African American/Africana Literature and Culture,” as an ASA conference presentation, and dissertation chapter, which is also to say that many people contributed their time, energy, and wisdom to supporting its realization in this current form. Any remaining shortcomings are of course mine but I wanted to share my acknowledgments again here to make visible the often unseen, unpaid labor that goes into the life of a publication like this:

This essay benefitted from the insights of many eyes. I would like to thank Kandice Chuh, Duncan Faherty, the members of my dissertation writing group, and my colleagues on the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center, CUNY, for their generous feedback on earlier drafts. Many thanks also to Cathy N. Davidson, the two anonymous reviewers, and the Board of Managing Editors at American Quarterly for sharing the critical insights that helped me realize my vision for this piece in its final stages. Lastly, I want to thank my sister, Sharon Tran, for her unflagging support; the meditations on what it means to approach an archive with care in this essay are, in part, indebted to her always careful reading of my work.

There are many others who haven’t been mentioned here by name, including an entire class of students that I taught at Queens College who challenged and deepened my thinking about Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda more than I could have ever anticipated; their questions and energy animates this essay as well. I look forward too to the ways in which future readers will take up and give continued life to this work in the years to come.

This year has passed by in a whirlwind of emails and events, planning sessions, meetings, and conferences, interviews, sudden trips, and all of those big and small life moments in between. Still, with summer right around the corner and the promise of lazy beach days to come, I want to press pause to reflect and take in what this year, what being a part of this program, has meant. I’ve already written my letters to CUNY and FSU but this one needs its own space in part to recognize the importance of the space you’ve given me.

The opportunity to join the Futures Initiative came just at the right moment when I was nearing the end of an exhilarating and exhausting year teaching at Fordham, wondering what my next step should be. The idea of taking a breather from the classroom to take on a leadership role in running and building a program was daunting and unfamiliar but also exciting, challenging, and, if I’m honest, a relief after a long year of too much teaching and grading and not enough time to think and do my own research. You caught me, in short, at a moment of awkward and uncertain transition and for that I need to say thank you, even though this year has felt like a long drawn-out series of thank you’s that can never possibly capture the complicated emotions and depths of my appreciation. But let me try anyway.

I could list the big public-facing events that you gave me space to organize, including that one in September on “Pedagogies of Dissent for Asian American Studies” that allowed me to bring my questions, work, and myself into the program. This and the other events we organized this year created room for ongoing conversations about the stakes of higher education, pedagogy, politics, aesthetics, and what we as scholars, teachers, and students could do to materialize a university worth fighting for. But while these were occasions to assemble the different publics and communities we serve, to clear space for precisely those vital, timely dialogues, I am perhaps most grateful for the internal, invisible things that this program accomplishes that do not fit neatly into event recaps.

So, let me say thanks by bringing to light some of this invisible stuff that too often escapes notice because it happens during quiet meetings, on frantic phone calls, endless email loops, and–perhaps unique to this program–on giant post-it notes and in ever-expanding collections of collaborative Google Docs. Thank you for teaching me about the tremendous amount of labor involved in running a vibrant, multi-faceted program that cuts across CUNY, New York City, and beyond. I had a small taste of this behind-the-scenes work this year; the relentless energy it takes to track down answers and resources, to wrestle with fickle budgets and deal with inevitable technical glitches, to lay the groundwork, devise back-up plans, and carve out spaces and opportunities for creativity, mentorship, community, and conversation that are so vital–in short, the work that Lauren, Celi, Cathy, and Katina model daily with grace, passion, and dedication. I have learned from all of you what it means to be a fierce administrator and leader, to embody a willingness to listen, learn, stand up, give time, fight for, and defend, all at once, a practice of inhabiting institutions that I take with me.

I’ve been holding my breath, holding myself back from writing this letter because I know that it can never encompass all I want to say about what being in and of you has meant. And/but I am taking the advice that a CUNY mentor once gave me when I was floundering during the dissertation process, to start writing before you areready,because I know this letter is one that I’ll never be fully ready to write.

In many ways, it was growing up in and with you that helped me find community, direction, purpose, a voice, myself. So, there is much I want and need to say:

The first is thank you. Thank you for giving me opportunities that I know I haven’t always appreciated. Thank you for the people you brought into my life–friends, teachers, mentors, allies, leaders, students, strangers–people who have been variously kind, strong, loving, hurtful, generous, difficult, inspirational. Thank you for the way you forced me to get to know this city, to move out of the sheltered corner of Little Neck, Queens where I grew up to traverse its sprawling landscape, to walk across bridges, to find other sites of belonging. You taught me how to feel at home in this city. Thank you for the skills you helped me develop while I was learning and working as a CUNY student and teacher: the ability to read, write, and grade papers standing on public buses and trains, a dexterity honed during long commutes and all-too-frequent MTA delays; a knack for finding windows in stuffy, claustrophobic buildings, to look for spaces to let light in when the weight of the work feels especially heavy; a know-how for tracking down resources, opportunities, and pockets of funding, which you haven’t always made easy to find, but it’s because of that that I learned to ask questions and to make demands, to realize the sound and worth of my own voice; an eye for recognizing people who are similarly lost and out of place, who are also driven by questions, ideas, and a refusal to accept things as they are; an intuition for making community out of commuter campuses, to find people and causes worth showing up and fighting for.This list could go on and on.

On Wednesday, March 28, 2018, the Futures Initiative hosted a daylong forum on “Publics, Politics, and Pedagogy: Remaking Higher Education for Turbulent Times.” Part of our University Worth Fighting For series, this event was an occasion to foster interdisciplinary conversation on the relationship between pedagogy, equity, and institutional change. It was also an opportunity for the people involved in the many areas of our program–from our graduate fellows and the students and faculty involved in F.I. team-taught courses to our undergraduate leadership fellows and colleagues in the Humanities Alliance–to share their knowledge and experiences in a public setting, to engage precisely the different publics our work serves. We were joined by faculty, staff, students, administrators, and activists both in person and online (via Twitter and livestream) from across CUNY, New York City, and beyond. During the event, we collectively contemplated the current state and stakes of higher education, the challenges of being both a teacher and student in today’s turbulent sociopolitical climate, and the possibilities that might arise from and through our pedagogy, creative work, political commitments, and public encounters, which the day’s activities and conversations only affirmed are not separate endeavors.

It was a pleasure for me to shape this event and then to watch it unfold, to listen and learn from old and new allies, and to revel in the ways that the Futures Initiative’s mission to advance innovation and equity in higher education resonated across the dialogues, workshops, presentations, and bodies assembled in the room.

This is a post that I was planning to write in January at the start of the new year, but I am glad that life and work got in the way because beginnings have taken on a sharper, more intense meaning for me these last few weeks. And, for once, the timing feels just right that I’m getting this writing in on the eve of Lunar New Year.

It would be wrong, of course, to say that beginnings are a new preoccupation of mine. Much of my scholarly work has been a meditation on and an effort to articulate other beginnings for Asian American studies and Asian Americanist critique. Thinking through the historic establishment of the field, the constraints of identitarian epistemologies, and other geographies for Asian America are some ways I’ve confronted questions around the objects and objectives, the scope, scales, and stakes of Asian American studies.

At the same time, beginning the dissertationthat would become my current book projectwas a struggle. I have written elsewhere about the anxiety of embarking on an Asian American cultural studies project, about fears that it would delimit the possibilities and audiences for my research and confine me to what is natural, expected, and known–an Asian American woman who would, of course, study Asian American literatures and cultures. And yet, recognizing that these concerns, which I’ve come to describe as the feeling of being minor, are not personal or individual, but rather structural and systemic–evidence of institutional racism and the effects of compartmentalizing minoritized knowledges–was a pivotal moment in my academic career and intellectual life.